Shayna Kendall, Lenny Soto, Kris Cuddy and Joe Landisio, the current S.V.U. detectives.CreditWilliam Mebane for The New York Times

Feature

To Catch a Rapist

A special-victims unit fights the hidden epidemic of sexual assault that is disturbingly difficult to investigate.

Shayna Kendall, Lenny Soto, Kris Cuddy and Joe Landisio, the current S.V.U. detectives.CreditWilliam Mebane for The New York Times

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By Kathy Dobie

Jan. 5, 2016

A dull, frigid winter morning. Overhead, the sky was locked in gray, only occasionally releasing an ashen, icy flake or two, more like iron shavings than snow. On the third floor of the New Haven police station, Detective Kris Cuddy had just finished interviewing the mother of a young rape victim. After escorting the woman downstairs, she was returning to her office in the Special Victims Unit. Her square-heeled boots made a quick, hard sound as she left the elevators, a tock-tock-tock that could be heard above the ringing phones and cubicle chatter. The detective had an Irish face — blue-eyed, pale-skinned, puckish, her coppery brown hair shorn close at the sides into a fauxhawk. She was one of only four investigators in the S.V.U., and she had 32 cases open at the moment. But during interviews with victims or their family members, she never displayed any sign of the pressure she was under. Her manner was steady and reassuring. So we’re here to discuss an incident that happened recently, she would begin, making only a vague allusion to the matter at hand before stepping back to allow people to tell the story in their own way. She would offer water, offer a tissue. Let them talk, circling back later to gather more details. At the end of interviews with victims, she almost always told them they were brave.

That morning, in a voice edged with distress, the mother had described a girl who seemed broken by the assault. The mother, too, was overwhelmed. When she broke down sobbing, covering her face, Cuddy placed her hand on the woman’s forearm, saying quietly, ‘‘We’re almost done. We’re almost done,’’ as if she were coaxing her to swim a little longer (they were almost at the shore!), coaxing her even though in all likelihood that shore no longer existed for her.

Cuddy shared an office with her partner, Detective Joe Landisio, their two desks facing each other and pushed together, edge to edge. The room was crowded with two printers, a table, another small desk and a huge file cabinet filled with old homicide cases that no one had bothered to move when the units switched offices. The bathroom was next door, so you could hear toilets flushing all day. When she walked into the office, she felt like going straight to sleep. The mother had been so distraught, and Cuddy couldn’t make a dent in that. ‘‘You know what this office needs?’’ she asked as she sat down at her desk, letting out a huge sigh. ‘‘A bar.’’

Landisio swiveled in his chair, scanning the room. ‘‘It could go right against that wall there,’’ he said, pointing to a spot beneath a cartoon drawing of a man joyfully kicking a pregnant woman — a ‘‘gift’’ from Officer Steve Formica, from Firearms, in recognition of the no-taboos humor char­ac­teristic of the S.V.U. squad. Its four detectives — Cuddy and Landisio, along with Nikki Natale and Jesse Agosto — worked roughly 400 cases a year, investigating mainly sexual assaults but also the abuse and neglect of children and seniors, domestic violence and child deaths, including homicides.

That afternoon, as Cuddy and Landisio ate lunch in front of their computers, Landisio read the files for two new cases that had landed on the already-toppling pile on his desk, muttering in singsong, ‘‘Punch me in the face, punch me in the face,’’ while Cuddy made out an arrest-warrant application for the suspect in the child’s rape. The girl had already been interviewed at the Yale Child Abuse Clinic, a five-minute drive from headquarters. The S.V.U. detectives never questioned children or young teenagers, leaving that job to the trained social workers with the clinic. But they observed these forensic interviews on a television screen in an adjoining room, along with a social worker and medical personnel from the clinic and a case worker from the state’s Department of Children and Families. The room was always crowded and often overheated. It was hard for Cuddy to be just an observer — she would have liked to interview the children herself. Sometimes she talked to them afterward, not to question them but to offer her support, to compliment them on their courage, to try to cheer them up. Landisio never wanted to talk to the victims. He wouldn’t know what to say. The whole thing just made him too sad.

All the forensic interviews took place in a small, comfortable room with two armchairs facing each other and an easel set up in between, and they followed a set format. After some friendly chitchat, the social worker would hang two anatomical drawings on the easel, one male, one female, and ask the child to name various body parts, starting with the innocuous ones — hair, eyes, arms — which were then written on the drawings. The social worker wanted to make sure to use the child’s own terminology — ‘‘pee-pee’’ or ‘‘privacy’’ for penis, for instance, or ‘‘coo-coo’’ or ‘‘toti’’ for vagina — so that the victim’s testimony would be clear.

Because interviewers always avoided leading questions, they often started the serious part simply by asking the child, ‘‘So, why are you here today?’’ Then the social worker would draw out the details of the assault, one by one. The questions were always excruciatingly specific but asked in a kindly, matter-of-fact way: What did it feel like when he touched your coo-coo? Did he touch you on the outside of your toti or on the inside? Did he say anything when he put his privacy in your tush? As the children were questioned, they squirmed or stared bleakly at the floor. With the utmost concentration, a pony-tailed girl picked at a loose thread on her sweater. Another girl yawned hugely. A boy gripped and rubbed his elbow as if he had just injured it, grimacing theatrically as he bent over his arm, his face hidden from the social worker. A girl who was raped while watching a cartoon sat silently, tears streaming down her cheeks; another schoolgirl pulled her sweater over her head and answered the questions from there. Honey, I can’t hear you, the social worker said.

Late that afternoon, Cuddy handed her application for an arrest warrant to the supervisor of their unit, Sgt. Betsy Segui, for review. From there it would be submitted to the court, where an inspector for the state’s attorney’s office would review it again before the court decided whether to issue a warrant. ‘‘Then we can get this [expletive],’’ Cuddy said. It was her way, the only one she had, of fixing things. But winter turned to spring, spring to summer and then summer to fall, and still Cuddy waited for her arrest warrant.

Most American rapes go unpunished. Rape statistics vary depending on the methodology used: The National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, states that only about 34 percent of rape or sexual-assault cases were reported in 2014. Based on a rigorous review of the academic research, End Violence Against Women International, a renowned research and training organization for law-enforcement officers and other professionals involved in sexual-assault investigations, estimates that only 5 to 20 percent of sexual assaults are reported, depending on the population studied. And according to a 2011 report by the University of Kentucky Center for Research on Violence Against Women, only 14 to 18 percent of all sexual assaults reported to the police are prosecuted.

Ideas about what constitutes a ‘‘real rape’’ still hinder rape investigations and prosecutions. In the minds of many police officers, prosecutors, juries, even victims themselves, a ‘‘real rape’’ is committed by a male stranger who uses a weapon to threaten the victim and inflicts serious injury. And yet about three-quarters of all sexual assaults reported to the police are committed by someone known to the victim, only 11 percent involve weapons and most don’t result in severe injuries. In a tragic twist, the most likely sexual-assault situations are often the ones most doubted or discounted by law enforcement — assaults involving drugs or alcohol, or those whose victims know their assailant or delay reporting the crime. Prostitutes are extremely vulnerable to rape, yet they are often treated dismissively by the police. The seriously mentally ill also suffer high rates of sexual assault, yet they are seen as unreliable. Many police officers continue to read vulnerability as complicity. It’s as if a victim of robbery were disbelieved because she lived in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood.

There is another unacknowledged side to the investigation of sexual assault: the huge numbers of victims who are children or teenagers. In New Haven, the detectives estimate that more than 80 percent of their cases involve minors — a number above but not that far afield from national statistics. In a 2014 study published by the National Center for Juvenile Justice, which analyzed data from the F.B.I.’s National Incident-Based Reporting System for the years 2009 and 2010, 61 percent of the female victims and 84 percent of the male victims of sexual assaults reported to law enforcement were younger than 18. For females, the age with the most sexual-assault victimizations was 14, and for males it was 4.

These cases are rarely reported immediately because children often feel confused, afraid or to blame, and because the perpetrators are often family members or family friends. Even many adult victims don’t report a sexual assault before the 72-to-120-hour cutoff after which hospitals will no longer conduct a forensic medical exam. Delayed reporting is the norm in sexual-assault cases, not the exception. In New Haven, the vast majority of the detectives’ cases are reported days, weeks, months, even years after the fact. Not only is there bias against a victim who waits to report an assault, but the delay also means that there is rarely any physical evidence — neither forensic evidence taken from the bodies of the victims or suspects nor crime scenes to investigate.

These prejudices about ‘‘real rape’’ happen to dovetail with those rapes that are easier to investigate and prosecute. In a 2002 review of charging decisions made by prosecutors in three major cities, Cassia Spohn, now director of the School of Criminol­ogy and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, found that prosecutors were substantially more likely to file charges ‘‘if the victim was injured, if the suspect used a gun or knife and if there was physical evidence,’’ and ‘‘if the victim reported the crime promptly’’ or ‘‘if there were no questions about the victim’s moral character or behavior at the time of the incident.’’

In spite of the difficulties of these investigations, it’s far too common for special-victims units to be understaffed and low on resources, according to Joanne Archambault, a retired sergeant with the San Diego Police Department and executive director of End Violence Against Women International. Police chiefs and sheriffs are often pressured by the community and the media to focus on more visible problems. ‘‘They are focusing their energy on gangs and narcotics because that’s what the community is talking about,’’ Archambault says. Rarely is there an outcry over police response to sexual assaults. ‘‘It’s the hidden epidemic, right? Nobody really wants to know about it.’’

These are also the first units to be plundered if more officers are needed elsewhere. At one time New Haven’s S.V.U. had 15 detectives, two supervising sergeants and a lieutenant, but in August 2011, a year that saw the city plagued by 130 shootings and 34 homicides (more than four times the per-capita murder rate in New York City that year), it was disbanded, and all the detectives were assigned to Major Crimes. A year and a half later, under the new chief of police, Dean Esserman, the unit was resurrected — this time with four detectives and one sergeant, though for one memorable month that year, Cuddy was the only detective working on the squad. ‘‘I don’t know how you did this all by yourself,’’ Landisio commented one day. Cuddy replied, ‘‘A lot of booze, a lot of booze.’’

Most detectives in New Haven dreaded being assigned to the Special Victims Unit. But Cuddy and Landisio wanted to be there. For Cuddy, it was simple: ‘‘It feels like the only unit where what you do really matters.’’ For Landisio, whom colleagues called Lando, it was also simple: He wanted to work with Cuddy. With 13 years on the job, four of them in the S.V.U., she was the detective with the most experience in the unit, but she also had a sense of humor that ran from ridiculously whimsical to jaw-droppingly filthy. In their office, it was not an unusual to see a strapping, dark-suited homicide detective walking away from some raunchy comment she made, shaking his head and murmuring, ‘‘Cuddy, Cuddy, Cuddy.’’ She could be a charismatic flirt (waitresses; female bartenders; their supervisor, Sergeant Segui) and was deeply in love with her wife, whose name was tattooed on the inside of her left wrist. Landisio had eight years on the job and just under a year in the S.V.U. He was short and dark-eyed with a silver barbell piercing his tongue. He had passions for electronic music, firearms, pit bulls and T. rexes. His appearance and personality might have been put together by an eclectic collector. The two detectives kept up a running commentary throughout the day that consisted of lines from ‘‘S.N.L.’’ sketches and YouTube videos, as well as bizarre quotations they’d heard working the job. ‘‘You two are like an old married couple,’’ one detective observed when she happened into the office one day as Landisio was running a lint roller down Cuddy’s back.

Last January, the unit lost two experienced detectives when they were transferred to Major Crimes, even though both wanted to stay with the S.V.U. They were replaced by Natale and Agosto, who shared an adjoining office. Natale, who was plucked from Homicide, didn’t want to be there. A tall, straight-talking blond woman, she told me: ‘‘I’m usually not this miserable. I don’t want to do this [expletive]. I have no interest. None.’’ Meanwhile, a group of rookies who were making the rounds at the station had visited every unit but theirs. Cuddy didn’t seem to care, but Landisio did. When I asked why they didn’t visit, Cuddy said: ‘‘Because what we do isn’t important. I’m not kidding. You can’t make this [expletive] up.’’

When a patrol cop ducked in to get Landisio’s and Cuddy’s advice on whether she should take the sergeant’s exam, she asked them, ‘‘Why does everyone hate this unit?’’ Neither Cuddy nor Landisio seemed insulted by the question. Because you work your butt off, they told her. You will do more interviewing here — of victims, suspects, witnesses — than you will ever come close to in any other unit. ‘‘It will make you a better cop,’’ Cuddy said.

But it wasn’t just the workload; it was the nature of the crimes themselves. Too disturbing for your average cop. Then there was the amorphous character of the investigations: the lack of physical evidence, the time factor when so many of the reports came in long after the incident. A week into her assignment, Detective Natale said: ‘‘It seems like 95 percent of these cases are [expletive],’’ sounding completely frustrated and baffled by the work of investigating a crime without a scene to examine, weapons to trace, eyewitnesses to interview.

When the rookies were finally ushered into their office, after a lieutenant laughingly warned Cuddy to go easy on them, they stood just inside the doorway, shoulder to shoulder, looking blank-faced and ill at ease. Landisio swirled around in his chair, kicked off with a description of their caseloads, then looked to Cuddy to chime in. ‘‘I’m just going to sit here and eat my cold sore,’’ she said pleasantly. The rookies stared at her.

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An interview room used by the New Haven Police Department’s Special Victims Unit.CreditWilliam Mebane for The New York Times

Landisio tried again, going into a history of his law-enforcement career. ‘‘I started walking in ’09. …’’

‘‘On Milford beach,’’ Cuddy interjected brightly. ‘‘Collecting seashells.’’ The rookies shifted uneasily side to side. One guy finally asked Cuddy whether she had chosen to be in this unit. No, she said, she was assigned, but she had worked in almost every other unit, and none was as satisfying as this one. Not a lot of people want to be here, she said, because ‘‘90 percent of our cases are kids being drilled in the ass by their grandfathers. But when you lock up their grandfather, that kid will never forget you for being their voice.’’ When the rookies left, five uncomfortable minutes later, I got the feeling that they were all fervently hoping they would never be assigned there, but Cuddy merely rolled her eyes.

The first step to a successful sexual-assault investigation is investigating, which would seem to be a given. All too often, though, that’s not what happens. A recent review of the New Orleans Police Department by the city’s inspector general, for example, found that from 2011 to 2013, five detectives from the sex-crimes unit filed investigative reports in only 14 percent of the sexual-assault and child-abuse cases assigned to them. Most initial reports of assaults were misclassified as ‘‘miscellaneous’’ and simply closed without any investigation at all. In a particularly galling example, detectives closed the case of a 2-year-old who was taken to an emergency room after a suspected sexual assault, and who tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease. The primary detective wrote in his report that the toddler did not disclose any information that would warrant a criminal investigation. The inspector general found that the sex-crimes detectives worked without supervision and closed cases without any review.

In New Haven, unless a victim chooses not to file charges, every case that is assigned to an S.V.U. detective is investigated. According to Segui, the detectives refer about 90 percent of their cases to the state’s attorney’s office for an arrest warrant — though that doesn’t mean they’ll get one. Every recommendation by a detective either to proceed with an application for an arrest warrant or to close a case is first reviewed by Segui, then by the court. The detectives have considerable influence on Segui. ‘‘I trust them,’’ she told me. If the detectives feel they should close a case, she looks it over herself and then occasionally has the prosecutor ‘‘in essence, quote-unquote, check our work.’’

During my months with the unit, the detectives closed six cases out of dozens without applying for an arrest warrant. There was a young woman who told an emergency-room nurse that a friend raped her. Her lip was swollen as if she’d been punched in the mouth. She didn’t want to file a complaint, but Cuddy persuaded her to take the sexual-assault exam, so that they would have the evidence if she changed her mind. A mother reported that her 3-year-old son said her ex-partner bit and pulled his penis, but the boy never disclosed this or any other abuse during his forensic interview. If there’s no medical evidence (there wasn’t), and if a child doesn’t mention abuse during the forensic interview, the case doesn’t move forward. Cuddy also noticed that when the mother was asked to repeat exactly what her son said, she used the word ‘‘penis’’; in his interview, the boy always used the word ‘‘pee-pee.’’

Some cases were so tangled and muddy that the truth remained unknowable, and they eventually withered because of a lack of probable cause. One of these was a case that came back to the unit: an injured woman whom the detectives interviewed in the hospital two months earlier, after hospital personnel called in a case of possible domestic abuse. The victim told the detectives she didn’t know how her face became bruised and bloodied. She had been sleeping at her ex-boyfriend’s house the night before, so she could drive him to work the next morning, and she woke to the taste of blood in her mouth. She said her ex-boyfriend told her she had fallen. She thought maybe he had elbowed her in her sleep. With no claim of domestic abuse, Landisio referred the case back to patrol, and an officer interviewed the ex. That report concluded: ‘‘Due to [complainant’s] conflicting report and no evidence of domestic violence, there was no arrest made. No further actions were taken.’’

But shortly afterward, the victim claimed her ex-boyfriend had beaten and sexually assaulted her, and the case was reassigned to Landisio. ‘‘She definitely got [expletive] up,’’ Landisio said. He was sitting at his desk across from Cuddy, examining a photograph of the woman’s face — the right side was puffy and purpled, the eye sealed shut, as if she’d been lying half-submerged in water. ‘‘Yeah, but how?’’ Cuddy asked. ‘‘That’s the question.’’

Landisio and Cuddy interviewed the victim again, and this time she described her ex asking for sex that night and hitting her after she refused. The last thing she heard before passing out was her clothes being ripped, she said. When Landisio asked her why she didn’t mention the assault before, the woman said it took a few days for the memories to come back to her.

Landisio filled out a request for the victim’s medical records, while Cuddy found the suspect’s profile on Facebook. He had posted a handful of photos from fishing trips of himself proudly displaying his catch, the fish gripped in his right hand. All of the woman’s injuries were to the right side of her face, which meant that if she was punched, it was likely to have been by a left-handed person. Landisio and Cuddy started searching on Google for images of facial injuries from falls to see if there was any resemblance between those and the particular bruising and swelling on the woman’s face. The assault story was looking weaker to them, but they both thought the woman’s injuries seemed too severe for just tumbling out of bed.

Three weeks later, Landisio interviewed the ex-boyfriend. He didn’t like interviewing suspects. When you asked a victim a hard question, you were doing it for her benefit. But suspects? He worried about the innocent ones tripping themselves up. ‘‘I think of how the implications of what they’re saying could lead to a lifetime in prison,’’ Landisio said. The suspect was voluble and animated to the point of cartoonishness. In his version of events, his ex-girlfriend was drinking and taking prescription medicine that night and didn’t fall off the bed — he heard a crash while he was in another room and found her lying in the middle of the bedroom. To him, it seemed she had keeled over from a standing position, like a felled tree. When he tried to move her, she told him to leave her alone.

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Kris Cuddy holding dolls sometimes used by the Yale Child Abuse Clinic in forensic interviews with children.CreditWilliam Mebane for The New York Times

Afterward, Landisio felt his account was credible. He never deflected a question or repeated it to buy himself time. He leapt at every query, often interrupting Landisio, eager to explain. And the suspect was all of one piece: amiable, entertaining, self-absorbed and contemptible — but consistently so. When he heard her fall? He was aggravated by the noise because a family member was sleeping upstairs. When the victim refused to be moved? He went about his night, fixing his dinner, checking in occasionally to see if she was still breathing. When he woke in the morning to find her gone? He called her son, even driving to their house on his suspended license hoping she was there. He still wanted her to drive him around. And the suspect signed his statement with his right hand.

The victim’s son later confirmed to Landisio that the suspect had called several times and come to their house looking for his mother. Landisio submitted copies of the interviews, the medical records, the original police report and his own report to Segui. He told her he didn’t think they had probable cause for an arrest warrant. Segui and then the state’s attorney’s office agreed. No arrest warrant was issued, and the case was closed.

One of the least-examined myths surrounding rape investigations is that these cases come down to he said, she said: When the victim and the suspect give their versions of the event, one party is lying and one is telling the truth, and somehow the detectives have to examine the quality of each person’s testimony, discern their individual characters and decide which is which. But the most current thinking on sexual-assault investigations is that there is always corroborating evidence. Detectives just have to be willing to search for it. It might be found in cellphone records or on social media; there might be witnesses before or after the act. Finding this other evidence requires commitment and creativity on the part of the investigators. These are complicated, time-consuming investigations.

In early February, Cuddy was assigned a case involving a teenage girl who claimed she was raped by an older male relative while she was in elementary school. A delay of more than seven years in reporting? Not even worth commenting on. Often the victims decided to talk because something happened, there was some final pressure and they broke. For this teenager, it was her mother lecturing her once again about boys and sex. The girl lost it. She didn’t even like boys, she told her mother. She didn’t even want them touching her. That got her mother’s attention in a whole different way.

According to the Department of Children and Families report Cuddy was reading, the girl claimed she was raped while in the care of her mother’s friend when her mother was incarcerated. The male relative showed up at the house and told the friend she could leave — he would watch the child. Then he raped her.

The girl had a forensic interview scheduled at the Yale clinic later in the month, but the mother was coming to the station that day. Before she arrived, Cuddy ran her name through various law-enforcement databases. She was looking for dates when the mother was locked up. Yellow highlighter suspended, Cuddy frowned at the printout in front of her. She saw several jail sentences, all suspended. Six months, suspended; one year, suspended. There was no jail time that matched the year the girl would have been raped.

In the interview room, Cuddy sat no more than an arm’s length from the mother, taking notes on a legal pad. The mother kept her elbows on the table and her hands clasped. Her face was tense and grave, and at first there was a slight tremor in her voice. Cuddy opened the interview with: ‘‘And this is in regard to your daughter?’’

Yes, the mother nodded.

‘‘O.K., why don’t you tell me everything that happened from the beginning?’’

The mother described the argument that led to her daughter’s divulging the rape. When her daughter named her rapist, the mother’s voice went hard and flat. ‘‘Walk me through it,’’ she said to her daughter tersely. The girl told her what the man did, and when she repeated the words he said while he raped her, the mother knew her daughter wasn’t lying: He said the same thing before raping her when she was a girl.

The interview solved one mystery: The mother told Cuddy that she believed the rape took place while she was detained after being picked up on a misdemeanor charge. She was locked up for only six or seven hours while she waited to be arraigned. Still, the situation felt slightly improbable. How did the relative happen to walk through that narrow window of opportunity?

Cuddy went back to the records, no longer looking for a jail sentence during the time period the girl was assaulted but an arrest — an arrest at a location the mother named that led to approximately six hours of lockup. She would find that first and figure out the suspect’s omniscience later.

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An examination room at the Yale Child Abuse Clinic.CreditWilliam Mebane for The New York Times

And then there it was: the right year, the right misdemeanor charge. An arrest and then hours later, the booking. Scanning the police report, Cuddy suddenly said very quietly: ‘‘He was with her. That’s how he knew. He was with her.’’

The police arrested the mother in front of him and took her away, and there he was — with the certain knowledge that she would be gone for hours. ‘‘I got it,’’ Cuddy said. ‘‘Phew!’’ Then she let out a relieved laugh.

During the teenager’s forensic interview, which Cuddy watched craned close to the monitor so she could catch every word, her voice was barely audible. She never once made eye contact with the social worker. If she could gesture ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ rather than speak, she did. After it was over, Cuddy asked the mother if she could speak to her daughter. In a room set aside for children, they sat over a game of Jenga, and Cuddy told the girl she was proud of her. ‘‘You’re a survivor now, not a victim,’’ she said. ‘‘You’re free from this point on. You’ve talked about it, and you don’t need to talk about it again.’’

As she headed back to headquarters, Cuddy said, ‘‘I finally got her to smile.’’ When she told the girl she was going to arrest the relative, Cuddy asked for a high-five. The girl slapped her hand, a smile slipping shyly into view. ‘‘Which makes me feel great, you know?’’ Cuddy said. ‘‘Win-win.’’

The office smelled of industrial floor cleaner and burned coffee. Officer Steve Formica lingered in the doorway, coffee cup in hand. ‘‘Go back to your office with your Hello-Kitty-ass mug,’’ Landisio told him, looking up from a case file. Not blinking, his lips barely moving, Formica said, ‘‘I came out for coffee.’’

‘‘I came out for [expletive],’’ Cuddy chimed in. Formica’s eyes gleamed briefly, like the pulse from a lighthouse, but his face remained immobile. It was snowing outside. A toilet flushed next door. Landisio continued to read. He had just been assigned a case of a 15-year-old who said a classmate assaulted her in the school auditorium. He had gone to the school to look at the layout and collect any footage from the school’s surveillance cameras. An hour before the girl’s forensic interview, he scanned the police report, reading sections out loud. The teenager told the patrol officer that she and the boy were backstage in the auditorium, making out, and ‘‘the next thing she knows, he was inside of her,’’ Landisio read.

‘‘There you go, those are the key words,’’ Cuddy said. ‘‘ ‘The next thing I knew.’ She’s leaving something out.’’ That was one of the verbal cues they paid attention to, those time gaps in a subject’s story. ‘‘And before I knew it. ... ’’ ‘‘The next thing I remember. ... ’’ During interviews, they would first let the subject proceed with her unprompted narration, and then they would return to those gaps — slowing the narration down, backfilling the account with details. Those specific questions could make the case stronger. Or they could reveal that the subject was evasive on purpose. Understanding why was essential. Many victims will try to present themselves as ‘‘better victims,’’ embarrassed or afraid to admit they were drunk at the time, for instance, or that they were close to their attacker. The detectives almost never interviewed a victim more than once, because even the smallest contradiction between their statements was a gift for a defense attorney. So they had to get it right the first time. If they didn’t, they might not be able to pursue a case. The heart of every investigation was that victim interview — if done right, it provided exploratory avenues for the detectives. It became the road map for the investigation.

As Landisio continued to prepare for his interview with the 15-year-old, Cuddy took a call from the Connecticut state laboratory: There was a DNA match linking a suspect to two stranger rapes that occurred in 2012 and 2013. The first victim, who worked as a prostitute, was attacked late at night; the second, a mother in her 40s who was assaulted as she was walking to work before dawn. Each woman was yanked off the street at knife point, pulled into an empty lot, forced to her knees and then onto her back and then upright again as she was orally, vaginally and anally raped.

Rapes by strangers are more likely to be reported, and reported immediately, but they have their own investigative challenge: identifying the perpetrator. Images from a surveillance camera at one of the crime scenes were too fuzzy to be of use, even after Cuddy sent them to the F.B.I. lab for enhancement. The victims’ descriptions of the rapist narrowed it down to a light-skinned man with a Spanish accent, no facial hair, possibly in his 30s — it was hardly much to work on. Victims’ identifications are usually too fragmentary to be helpful, Cuddy told me. ‘‘Sometimes they can’t tell you anything, but they can tell you he had a black thumbnail because they just focused on that to get out of the moment. When you think of what’s happening, they have to focus on something, and it’s not gonna be his face.’’

DNA evidence from a sexual-assault exam can be the key to solving stranger rapes — but only if the rapist’s DNA is in the F.B.I.’s national database, known as the Combined DNA Index System (Codis). In 2011, the Connecticut state lab lost its accreditation after federal audits found a backlog of thousands of DNA cases. A year later, the lab regained its accreditation and underwent a major expansion with a new director. This fall, Connecticut passed new legislation mandating that the police submit rape-kit evidence to the lab within 10 days of a crime and that the lab test the evidence within 60 days. But in some parts of the country, many kits are still never tested at all. Tens of thousands sit untested in police storage units and public lab facilities. And those are the ones that have been counted. Many police agencies do not even inventory the rape kits in their evidence lockers. Underfunded and poorly staffed forensic labs have been partly responsible for the backlog, because processing a single rape kit typically costs between $1,000 and $1,500. Last year, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, along with the Department of Justice, awarded a total of nearly $80 million in grants to local jurisdictions across the country to eliminate rape-kit backlogs. (To provide the grants, the Manhattan district attorney used asset-forfeiture funds from settlements with international banks that had violated United States sanctions.)

Another cause is police discretion: In most jurisdictions, investigators decide whether to forward a rape kit to the lab for processing. Officers may shelve the evidence because they think the case is unlikely to be taken up by the prosecutor. Many also mistakenly believe that DNA testing is useful only in identifying an unknown rapist. And yet acquaintance-rape cases with DNA evidence do better in court — not only are these cases more likely to be pursued by prosecutors, but they’re also more likely to end in a successful conviction. Having that DNA in the database also often helps solve other cases, because many rapists are repeat offenders. (In a 2006 study, interviews with 41 serial rapists found that their first victims were younger siblings, neighborhood children, girlfriends, spouses; in other words, they started as acquaintance rapists.)

A lack of leads led Cuddy to close both stranger-rape cases almost a year earlier, though they were subject to being reopened if any new evidence came in. And so it did — nearly three years after the first assault. The DNA had been matched to a man who was in prison for another, nonsexual offense.

‘‘Yes!’’ Cuddy declared when she got off the phone with the state lab, after hearing about the Codis match.

‘‘That’s awesome!’’ Landisio said.

‘‘That’s some ‘Law & Order’ [expletive] right there,” Formica added. When Segui came into the office, Cuddy told her the news. ‘‘That deserves a drink,’’ the sergeant said.

‘‘I think that deserves breast milk from the supervisor,’’ Cuddy replied. Segui tilted her head, smiling and looking at Cuddy the way you might at a particularly precocious and captivating child, then headed off to a meeting.

‘‘So good, so good,’’ Cuddy said emphatically, talking to herself, as she looked up the suspect’s criminal record. ‘‘Stranger rapes never get solved.’’ She stared at his mug shot for a minute: a slight, rabbity-looking man in his early 20s with an almost concave face. ‘‘That’s the little [expletive].’’ Immediately, she made out the arrest warrant for each attack, handing them to Segui for review. Segui submitted them to court a week later. The suspect was due to be released from prison in November, so it seemed as if nothing could possibly go wrong. The man would be served with the warrant while he was still locked up; no other woman would be forced through that terrible ordeal.

Victim No. 1 had dropped out of sight, but Cuddy phoned victim No. 2, the mother in her 40s. ‘‘I’m calling to let you know I received a Codis match, and I will be doing an arrest warrant for your attacker. As soon as I serve it, I will let you know.’’ There was a pause. ‘‘You’re welcome. Goodbye.’’ Cuddy said the victim started crying at the news. She turned to me, her face lit from the inside, and said, ‘‘And that, my dear, is why I do this job.’’

Across the country, in this city and that jurisdiction, improvements in sexual-assault investigation are slowly being made. Human Rights Watch recently released a report on four cities that had re-examined their approach to sex crimes and significantly improved their investigative practices — Austin, Tex.; Philadelphia; Grand Rapids, Mich.; and Kansas City, Mo. The highly regarded sex-crimes unit in San Diego (which Joanne Archambault supervised for 10 years) was used as a benchmark. In these cities, detectives are trained extensively in interviewing trauma victims, making suspects the focus of their investigations and dismantling their assumptions about ‘‘real rape’’ and how a ‘‘real victim’’ is supposed to respond. After being assigned to the Kansas City Special Victims Unit, detectives work with a senior member for three months under close supervision. In San Diego, new members of the sex-crimes unit not only receive 32 hours of training in topics related to sexual-assault investigation, but also have a two-week training pe­riod with two detectives, and their first victim interviews are observed. These city police departments recognize that experience investigating homicides and other major crimes is not adequate preparation for rape cases.

In most of these model cities, victims aren’t interviewed in the bare-bones rooms used for suspects but in more comfortable ones, with couches, artwork and lamps. They’re given handouts describing how the criminal-justice process works, how to apply for victims’ compensation and information on victims’ support groups. Austin and Grand Rapids have a blind reporting option that allows the victim to be anonymous but still give useful information to the detectives.

All these police agencies have extensive reviews in place, so detectives aren’t allowed to shelve a case without oversight. Philadelphia significantly revamped its sex-crimes unit after a 1999 Philadelphia Inquirer investigation revealed that the unit was misclassifying — basically burying — about a third of all complaints it received. Since then, an external oversight committee made up of experts in women’s legal rights, children’s advocates and staff members from rape-crisis centers has examined 300 to 400 cases annually, including all ‘‘unfounded’’ rape reports.

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Joe Landisio’s and Kris Cuddy’s desks in the New Haven S.V.U.CreditWilliam Mebane for The New York Times

In these units, detectives and victims stay in contact. The No. 1 complaint of sexual-assault survivors, according to Archambault, is that law enforcement doesn’t keep them up to date on the status of their investigations; often detectives don’t even return victims’ phone calls. Yet keeping in touch with the victims is espe­cially important in the case of sexual assault, she says, ‘‘because there are so few good outcomes.’’ Denied justice, victims especially need to feel respected by law enforcement. But the reason that it’s crucial to stay in contact with the victims is the same reason that detectives often don’t — they hate being the bearers of bad news. As noted in the policy and training guidelines published in 2015 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police: ‘‘Virtually all sexual-assault victims want validation from the authorities that the crime occurred, and this may be a more critical element of a successful response and investigation than a criminal prosecution or conviction. Regardless of the investigative results, responding officers and investigators have the power to help a person heal from sexual assault.’’

Many educators and leaders in this field say that arrest rates are not the best indicators of success. Instead, the thoroughness of the investigation and whether the victim stays in the process are more useful. Crime numbers are also not a good indicator of successful policing, unless you’re willing to use what feels like reverse logic: Better, more responsive policing means more victims come forward. And more honest record-keeping means more of those assaults are counted.

New Haven’s sexual-assault unit adheres to only some of these best practices. Cases involving minors are reviewed twice a month by a multi­disciplinary team that includes representatives from local police departments, the Department of Children and Families, the Yale Child Abuse Clinic and the Clifford Beers Clinic, a mental-health facility that serves children and their families in the greater New Haven area. But cases involving adult victims are reviewed ‘‘in house’’ by Segui. The unit has been short-staffed, though according to an assistant chief, Archie Generoso, the department plans to add three detectives to the S.V.U. by early March. What makes the New Haven S.V.U. effective is the mentality and the dedication of the detectives who want to be there. You can teach technique and locate resources, but attitudes are harder to change. Cuddy and Landisio each had friends who were abused as children or raped as young adults. They didn’t start from a place of suspicion and denial, as so many law-enforcement officers do.

In the spring, Cuddy and Landisio stored their portable heaters back under their desks. They started doing push-ups and squats every hour on the hour in the small space, so Cuddy could get in shape for a coming vacation with her wife in Mexico. They went on a Paleo diet. They were both at their desks after one of their mini workout sessions, typing up reports, when Cuddy received a call about her Codis cases.

The assistant state’s attorney had decided that the office was going to, in his words, ‘‘wait’’ on the warrant regarding the prostitute’s rape, because there was semen from multiple men on the vaginal swab. Cuddy was furious. ‘‘The guy is a serial rapist,’’ she said. ‘‘And obviously, there’s a mix — she’s a prostitute.’’ And although there was a mix of DNA on the vaginal swab, only the suspect’s DNA was found on the swab taken from the woman’s mouth.

The state’s attorney’s office had also requested an additional piece of information for the other warrant. Now that it had a suspect, the court wanted Cuddy to ask the second victim whether she knew the man or ever had a sexual relationship with him. Cuddy had no choice but to make that call, and later that day she typed two additional sentences into the warrant application saying the victim did not know the suspect and never had sex with him before the rape. She looked angry and tired, and Landisio kept casting worried glances her way.

There were dark moments at the S.V.U., and this was one of them; they moved in fast and sucked the light out of the room. And then you saw how much sense it would make to chuck everything — the sobbing mothers, the kids and the women muscling their way through their statements, every word like a nail in their mouths.

That afternoon, a fresh-faced intern, a criminal-justice major from the University of New Haven, popped into the office. ‘‘The copy machine’s not working again,’’ she said. ‘‘It says it needs resources. It has paper, it has toner, what resources does it want?’’

‘‘It wants your soul,’’ Cuddy told her. ‘‘Just slip it in the slot. We all have.’’ There was a beat of silence, then Landisio, the intern, Natale and Formica (who had ducked into the office to see why it was so weirdly quiet) broke into laughter. Cuddy lowered her sharp little chin and, glancing coyly at them all, flashed a grin.

This is what they lived on, what drove them forward — a sense of justice, of course, but that justice was so infrequent, so arbitrary, that their fuel had to be camaraderie and humor. They carried one another, quite literally in one case — Landisio hauling Cuddy into her apartment on his back after a night of drinking on the anniversary of her father’s death. Once, when I asked them what the toughest part of their job was, they didn’t say mucking through the ugliness of these cases every day; they didn’t mention their huge workload. They said it was waiting for the court to approve their arrest warrants. The average delay, Cuddy said, was three months. One case that I watched them pursue took 10. Victims gave up. ‘‘I just had a victim drop out of a case last week,’’ Landisio told me at one point. ‘‘She said to me, ‘I didn’t think it would take so long.’ She said she was over it now and just wanted to move on.’’ Months crawled by, and suspects disappeared.

By spring, Natale got her wish and was transferred to Major Crimes. Detective Shayna Kendall, from their old crew, got her wish and returned. She moved her desk into Cuddy and Landisio’s office, and you could feel the unit picking up cohesion, efficiency, speed. (By the fall, Detective Lenny Soto would also be returned to the unit, and he, too, would move his desk inside that tiny office, so the four detectives were almost joined at the hip.) A week after Kendall’s return, she had 17 cases, some carried over from when she was still in the squad, cases waiting at court for arrest warrants, as well as new ones assigned by Segui. Cuddy had 22. Landisio, working 21 cases, including a sex-trafficking case he was investigating with the F.B.I., said he felt as if he were ‘‘juggling cannon balls.’’ Segui apologized, saying she tried to hold back those that weren’t as urgent, but Cuddy said, ‘‘Just [expletive] assign them. We’ll prioritize and do what we have to do.’’

When Cuddy finally received her arrest warrant for the Codis case, it was six months after her first request, and three months after she was asked to add the follow-up sentences. The inspector at the state’s attorney’s office called her with the news, and she reminded him that the suspect was in prison, so the court would serve the warrant. Shortly afterward, the inspector emailed her. When she read the email, she was livid. The suspect was released early — a month prior, in fact. ‘‘They sat on a Codis case for what? Six months?’’ she said, spitting out the words. ‘‘He’s gonna be in a homeless shelter. I’m never gonna find this guy — if he’s not already in Mexico.’’ He had been released without parole, so there was no parole officer to contact and no forwarding address.

She, Kendall and Landisio began searching databases, trying to find some whiff of him, while Cuddy muttered to herself: ‘‘Don’t get frustrated. Just do all this [expletive]. Do it for nothing.’’ Then Kendall hit on something — their suspect was stopped by the police three days earlier, and when they asked where he lived, he gave them his sister’s address. Within minutes, the three detectives, Sergeant Segui and Officer Formica were piled into two cars, heading to the address. The suspect’s two sisters were in the second-floor apartment of a multifamily house. Once the detectives were let in to search the premises, Cuddy found a bedroom that was locked. After shouting ‘‘Police!’’ to no response, she kicked the door in while the sisters screamed at her in Spanish. But no one was inside. The sisters said they hadn’t seen their brother since he was locked up over a year ago.

On the ride back to the stationhouse, as the detectives recounted the raid, the adrenaline seeped from the car like boiling water from a pot going dry. Cuddy didn’t believe the sisters; in a way, she didn’t want to. But the next day, she found out that her suspect was, indeed, gone for good. He had been deported back to Mexico. ‘‘And these guys never stop,’’ Cuddy said.

Over the next 24 hours, her anger died away, morphing into a kind of grim fatalism. She had done everything right, the victims had soldiered through the investigation, submitting to the forensic exam, recounting the attack for the record. They had actually nailed the guy, and now he was gone. Cuddy stared bleakly at the pile of case files on her desk, making no move to open them. Finally she let out a sigh. She had to inform her victim now. The woman had cried with relief when she learned they had identified her rapist. Cuddy decided she had to do it in person. ‘‘I’ll come with you when you do it,’’ Landisio said. Cuddy looked at him and nodded. Then she turned to her newest case file.

Kathy Dobie is the author of the memoir ‘‘The Only Girl in the Car.’’ She has written for GQ and Harper’s Magazine.

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